How secure is your building?
Tenants want to know your building is doing everything possible to keep them safe from unwanted or troublemaking visitors. If your security is haphazard, unwanted visitors could get into your building – causing problems for your tenants. And, make them dissatisfied enough that they move to another building with better security.
Along with keeping tenants safe, your security also needs to create a positive visitor experience to keep your tenants happy. Tenants don’t want their visitors to wait more than a few minutes to get in.
If your security keeps visitors waiting for 30 minutes or more, this could cost your tenants business because clients didn’t have a good experience. This could lead to tenants leaving for buildings with better visitor access processes – costing you revenue.
How can you make your building secure – while creating a positive visitor experience? Here are 4 ways to increase security at your building – while reducing visitor check-in time.
1. Pre-Register Visitors
One way to increase security in your building and decrease visitor check-in time is by having an effective pre-registration process.
Before visitors arrive at your building, you should know they’re going to be there. Otherwise, you could accidentally let unwanted visitors in the building. Or, your team could be unprepared for visitors. This could cause the visitor check-in process to drag on for 30 or more minutes while security collects info.
However, if tenants pre-register visitors, you can avoid these problems. You’ll always know in advance who’s going to be in your building. This makes it easier to keep people unwanted visitors out because your team can only let in pre-registered visitors.
And, your team can check in visitors faster because they already have basic info about the visitors. So, they need to collect less information at the moment – allowing visitors to check-in faster.
While you could have paper or email pre-registration, this can be hard to keep up with. You have to get the information from tenants and pass it on to security, which can be time-consuming.
To avoid this, you can use visitor access software that lets tenants pre-register visitors on the same platform your security team has the pre-registration list. This minimizes the steps it takes to get info from tenants to your security team – making the process faster and less frustrating.
One way to increase security while reducing visitor check-in time is to pre-register visitors.
2. Capture Important Visitor Data
Another way to increase security while making visitor check-in faster is by capturing important visitor info.
Getting a visitor’s name helps you know who’s in the building. But, if you need to contact the visitor again or keep them from entering the building, you need more detailed information. Otherwise, an unwanted visitor could get into your building under a different name. And, if you need to contact a person due to exposure to illness, you’ll need at least their phone number.
But, collecting data on visitors can increase the time it takes visitors to check-in. If visitors have to fill out a lengthy form before checking in, it could increase visitor check-in times by 15 minutes or more. Having to fill out a complicated form that takes upwards of 15 minutes can be frustrating for visitors – leading to a negative visitor experience.
Instead, you could use visitor access software that makes it easy to capture detailed visitor info. While checking in, visitors or your security team simply have to fill in information digitally, which is much faster.
So, you get all the information you need to secure your building – while shortening the visitor check-in process.
Capturing important visitor data is another way to increase security and reduce visitor check-in time.
3. Have Multiple Ways to Check-In
Along with having pre-registration and capturing crucial visitor info, having multiple ways for your visitors to check-in can increase building security and decrease visitor check-in time.
If there’s only one way to check-in, your security team has to manually check-in every visitor. When many visitors are waiting, this can be overwhelming for your security team – causing them to miss key steps in the process. This could result in unwanted visitors getting into your building. Or, not having all the visitor info you need to keep your building safe.
Plus, only having one way to check-in visitors results in a long visitor check-in time. That can create a negative visitor experience – which also hurts your tenant experience and satisfaction.
While you could hire more security team members to have many lanes of check-in, this can be expensive. Instead, you can use visitor check-in software to allow visitors to digitally check-in multiple ways.
That way, you get all the information you need from visitors. And, you can reduce visitor wait time by allowing them to check-in at the same time – rather than waiting for other visitors to finish.
Having multiple ways for visitors to check-in is another way to increase building security while reducing visitor wait time.
4. Create a Watch List
One last way to increase building security and reduce visitor check-in time is to create a watch list of problematic visitors.
While most of your building visitors are respectful and never create problems for you, other visitors cause trouble every time they visit your building. These visitors might have been invited by tenants – or show up with no invitation. Either way, they cause problems for your building and tenants.
To keep your building safe, your security team needs to keep these visitors out of your building. But, if you don’t have a list of visitors to keep out, your security team could accidentally let a known problematic visitor into your building. This could result in costly property damage or make tenants feel unsafe – hurting your tenant retention.
Creating a watch list is the best way to prevent troublesome visitors from getting into your building. But, a paper watch list is hard to update and easy to lose – making it a little better than not having one.
Visitor access software allows you to create a digital watch list that your team can access from any supported device. And, it can include a picture along with a name – to keep problematic visitors out even if they use a different name. Plus, it’s easy to update. You simply add another person to the list, and your team can automatically see the new person on the list.
Another way to increase building security while reducing visitor check-in time is by creating a watch list to keep unwanted visitors out.
Wrapping It Up
Ensuring your building is safe is important to retaining tenants and having a good building reputation. But, you have to balance building safety with the visitor experience. So, you can’t have long wait times due to security – because this creates a negative visitor experience.
The good news is you can have a secure building with low visitor wait times. By having pre-registration for visitors, capturing detailed information, having multiple ways to check-in, and creating a watch list, you can increase the security of your building. And, with visitor access software that makes the whole process speedy, you can reduce visitor check-in times.
So, you can have a secure building with fast visitor check-in – which increases tenant satisfaction and retention. Leading to a more profitable property.
Looking for visitor access software that can help your property be more secure? Consider using Building Engines. With Building Engines’ visitor access module, you can pre-register visitors, capture details, provide multiple check-in methods, create a watch list, and more. All while reducing visitor wait-time.
